


You Cop Like a Cop

by Lucky107



Series: The Seventh Born [2]
Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: F/M, One Night Stands, Regret, Smoking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-06
Updated: 2018-05-06
Packaged: 2019-05-03 01:55:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14558301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lucky107/pseuds/Lucky107
Summary: A career as a junior deputy, twelve years in the making, awaits her at the Hope County Sheriff’s Department.





	You Cop Like a Cop

Tonight marks Roberta’s final night in Missoula.

Two years of boarding for college allowed the city a chance to grow on her and it would be a lie to suggest she wouldn’t miss all of its conveniences once she returned to Hope County. But a career as a junior deputy, twelve years in the making, awaits her at the Hope County Sheriff’s Department—and so does her family.

After spending the first thirty years of her life in Holland Valley, there’s nowhere else in Big Sky Country that could ever feel quite as much like home.

Roberta intends to suppress those confusing emotions with one last visit to her favourite watering hole and that’s how she winds up sharing a drink with U.S. Marshal Cameron Burke. They toast on cheap beer to her graduation and subsequent promotion before they retire to his equally cheap motel room just across the road to celebrate for the night.

“Forget the smoke,” Cameron growls, but the sound comes out slurred by all the alcohol. “The bed’s getting awful cold without ya.”

“You’re so needy—”

Once she finds a cigarette and her father’s old Zippo lighter, she rejoins him on the bed to light up. She’s barely got it burning when he snakes an arm around her naked middle and eases her down across his toned stomach.

After a long moment of silence, he messily runs his large fingers through her sweaty hair.

“What’s with this all of a sudden?” Roberta jokes around her smoke, searching for his dark eyes amid the shadows of the room. “We still got the whole night ahead of us before we gotta worry ‘bout tomorrow—ain’t got nowhere’s else to be 'til sunup.”

“You’ll be getting outta this place for good once all this is over, huh?” He says almost wistfully. “I’m jealous, Rookie.”

“But _you_ get to come back,” she offers on the tail of a couple of smoke rings. “Maybe we can switch places…”

“Easy, now. I wouldn’t wish my wife on _anybody_ , sweetheart.”

Roberta jabs a playful elbow into his side before offering him the cigarette. “There ain’t no need to talk about her tonight.”

“I told ya, I’m leaving her,” Cameron assures as if it makes any difference to Roberta’s conscience. What they have is little more than casual sex—they swore on a one-night stand. “Gonna get outta this city and start over, once and for all.”

“Think 'bout what you’re saying, Burke.” But he only offers a grunt in response. “Surely, the two of you can live in the same city without—”

“It’s not just _her_ , Roberta,” he says, forceful. “Missoula’s never done me any favours. Grew up in this shithole, for Christ’s sake. From as early as I can remember, it’s done nothing for me but chew up my dreams and spit them back in my face. I wanna go anywhere that isn’t _here_. Fuck the rest.”

A contemplative silence blankets them then and Roberta lets Cameron keep the cigarette.

He sure sounds like he could use a good smoke.

The dimness of the room forces them to synchronize their breathing by touch alone. Lying across him as she is, Roberta can feel every hitch, every skip of his thundering heart. It isn’t postcoital adrenaline. He’s _scared_.

“I was 'bout five, my dad and I used to throw a ball around,” he begins. “Lived in a suburb. You were probably learning to shoot a gun at that age, but I learned how to catch a ball. Hadn’t even touched a gun 'til I entered the academy—hadn’t done much 'til I entered the academy. Put all my time into sports.”

Presumptuous as he might be, Cameron isn’t wrong: Roberta was about five years old the first time her father put a gun in her hands and she never felt one way or the other about the decision.

It was just the way things were in Hope County.

She shot empty bottles off of fence posts until she was eight and her eldest brother took her on her very first hunting trip. Between the two of them, they never saw a single deer.

Albert talked most of the trip. He was adamant about teaching her the importance of respecting not only the wild game which she intended to shoot, but also the gravity of handling a firearm. _A gun is not a toy_ , he stressed, and the decision to pull the trigger was _never_ a decision to be made lightly.

It wasn’t until she was thirteen that Roberta learned her brother had non-fatally shot his best friend earlier that same month.

They had been playing with a loaded gun.

“My dad wanted me to succeed where he had failed in life. He was the quarterback of his high school football team, but abandoned it for a ‘real’ job once he learned my mom was pregnant,” Cameron laments. “I didn’t even make the team.”

Roberta reaches for the cigarette this time and he lets her take it, watching as she places the filter back between her lips for a much-needed drag.

She’s lying right here in front of him, but her eyes are a million miles away and Cameron can’t help wonder if her mind’s back in Hope County, reliving her own regrets through a microscopic lens of scrutiny.

If a firecracker like her even _has_ regrets, that is.

“Don’t be so hard on yourself,” Roberta says finally, unprofound and anticlimactic. “Took me twelve years to get to school, just to get some stupid piece of tin. 'Rookie'—I’ve been with the Sheriff’s Office for those twelve years, you know, working for _this_. Life ain’t supposed to be easy, Cam. Shit, if you’d became some big football star, I woulda been celebratin’ tonight alone. Think about _that_.”

A chuckle escapes him at the sheer simplicity of her argument.

It’s not that life _should_ be easy, he thinks. It’s that it should be _his_.

Football was never his passion—no more than being a police officer or being a husband—but he always believed that he would someday live vicariously through his father’s happiness. He was wrong. It took him three lifetimes to discover that he would _never_ be satisfied living someone else’s dream.

But it’s even harder to be satisfied while living with the knowledge that, after having spent so much of his life trying to be what the world told him he _should_ be, he no longer knows how to be anyone else.

How to be _himself_.

And yet all of these fears seem trivialized by the way Roberta’s looking at him right now, a tangle of bare limbs and sex-stained sheets. In her eyes, a stranger's eyes, he sees everything he’s never know he _could_ want in his life—and he thinks she’s exactly where he needs to start.

“Put that cigarette out,” he murmurs and he leans in to kiss Roberta’s smoky mouth. “We ain’t done celebrating yet.”


End file.
